How to query data about Amazon Athena itself?

Question

Are there any internal tables that we can query inside Athena that will give us info about the usage of Athena?

I am looking for data like:

• Which queries are saved?
• Which user queried what and when?

I know there are hidden fields like $path, but I wonder if there are hidden tables about metadata?

Answer 1

No. Amazon Athena is not like a traditional database.

Instead, this information is accessible via AWS AP requests, eg:

• list-named-queries can retrieve a list of query IDs
• get-named-query can then return information about a specific query
• list-query-executions returns a list of IDs for executed queries
• get-query-execution can be used to obtain details of the query that was executed

However, the query execution details does not show which user executed the query. Instead, you can obtain such information from AWS CloudTrail, which keeps track of API calls made to almost every AWS service (not just Athena). The CloudTrail record will include the queryExecutionId, which can be used in get-query-execution (above) to retrieve details of the query.